Transcript

File: macdonaldward06-oh-professionalopportunities_M.mp3

Speakers:

WM – Ward MacDonald

I think it’s a combination of things: just the time right now, the time we’re in right now. It's very easy to make a CD, any player that’s trying to go anywhere has a website and they put a press kit together, and it's a lot easier to promote yourself as a performer anywhere in the world than it would have been fifteen years ago. So that’s certainly a factor, plus we've had some examples now too from PEI and also from Cape Breton, wher it kind of happened that way where younger players like Natalie MacMaster and Ashley MacIsaac started making a living playing the fiddle. And along the same time line as them but a little bit younger was Richard Wood from here in Charlottetown, PEI. And Richard started to make a living from playing music, and all of a sudden all the players on the Island went, “Wow, you can make a living playing the fiddle!” So that certainly changed a lot of the attitudes. It wasn't just going to be something you played in your livingroom or something you played at a benefit concert: that it was something else. And that if you’re really good at it, and you work at it, and you put the work and time into making your stage show professional, then you belong on the same stage as these rock players or country players or whatever other style of music that people were used to going to see in a big show setting. Here on the Island twenty years ago people weren't used to going to a big show and seeing fiddling. If you went to a big show it was the Tommy Hunter Show was coming around on tour. Tommy Hunter is a country singer who hosted a television show on CBC, or someone from away putting on a big show. I don't think people thought of the fiddle as a big show thing. It wasn't something that you're going to put a show together and show the world with it. And now people realize that it can be if you want to do it. You don’t necessarily have to want to be that kind of player, or want to do that. There’s lots of players that only want to play at home, that only want to play at the local hall: which is great, and that gives you a great foundation for a tradition. But there’s going to be people that do take the music, take PEI fiddle music and use it as a launching pad to go around the world, literally, and play music.